I Feel Love

Has anyone else listened to the DVD commentary for Donnie Darko? (One of my two or three favourite movies of recent years, I may as well lay my cards on the table from the start.) I mean the commentary by writer/director Richard Kelly and star Jake Gyllenhall (definitely pronounced with a soft “g” by the way); there’s a second commentary with some of the other actors that I don’t know if I’ll bother with. But this Kelly/Gyllenhall commentary is interesting; it’s one of the few I’ve listened to that really fundamentally alters the way you see the film. Not just because Kelly constantly draws attention to the dozens of subliminal Rosebud-like data points the film is littered with that you would never actually notice except perhaps on a twentieth or fortieth viewing (so “Frank” is actually Donnie’s sister’s boyfriend? O…K…); more than this, Kelly offers a full-blown interpretation of the film, and not necessarily one that matches my own. Of course, being an obedient product of academic literary studies I don’t believe that an author’s extratextual explanations of his or her work carry any more weight in principle than anyone else’s, but it’s hard to ignore the force of a (more or less) cogently argued reading, especially when your own reading is itself totally (if unrepentently) incoherent.

What Kelly says (stop reading at this point if you don’t want to know) is that Donnie isn’t actually sick at all, he’s just the agent of a benevolent supernatural power that guides him to rip the engine of the plane his mother is travelling home in, then travel back in time to make the engine fall on his own house, thus repairing the ontological rupture that had made the engine appear from nowhere at the beginning of the movie. Although exactly why this is a solution I’m not sure, since it still involves the engine falling on the house several weeks before it fell off the plane…and the latter event only happens in the first place in a parallel universe which Donnie’s act of messanic sacrifice extinguishes. Be that as it may, Kelly’s point is that he sees the film as “pure” science fiction, the “marvellous” in Todorov’s terms, with the Bunny a genuine supernatural apparation rather than (as I had tended to see it) an expressionistic manifestation of something that only exists in Donnie’s mind, which nevertheless “miraculously” becomes a means for Donnie in the end to save…well, someone, it’s not entirely clear who, apart from the girlfriend. (That is, I saw the end of the film as crossing a kind of generic threshhold from the “uncanny” into the “marvellous”.) But in any case I rather enjoyed being confused about all this. It remains to be seen whether next time I see the film Kelly’s interpretation will have reduced everything to a flat clarity or added an extra layer to the confusion. I hope it’s the latter.

Oh, one delightful piece of information from the commentary comes when Kelly reveals that the famous smurf gang-bang conversation required clearance from the people in Europe who invented the smurfs, and that the successful negotiator was none other than (executive producer) Drew Barrymore!

I’ve had a long, ruminative post about Ed Wood percolating in my head for a couple of weeks now but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Every time I start writing it it comes out sounding pompous and overblown. Perhaps if I just give you the gist of it:

• Ed Wood is supposed to be the worst film director of all time, but he obviously isn’t;
• Which isn’t to say his films aren’t bad, but there have been and continue to be films released that are worse by any of the criteria that ought to matter: cynical, idiotic, totally unoriginal movies like, say, Gladiator, and don’t try telling me that isn’t a hundred times worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space;

• Tim Burton’s film about Ed Wood couldn’t have been made without Wood’s “worst of all time” status, yet it’s pretty clear from the film that Burton agrees with me that he wasn’t the worst of all time;
• Wood’s crazy little entourage are like the coolest, if the most dysfunctional, group of friends ever! (Hence my blogospheric parallel.)
• If films were like popular music, Wood’s modus operandi (low-budget, insanely auterist, unpolished, single-take, everything done by a collective that’s maintained from work to work), would nowadays be regarded as the authentic way of doing things, indeed in some circles as the only way of doing things. (This is the seed of a whole “if films were rock music” rant that you’re probably better off imagining for yourselves.)

There, glad I got that off my chest.

***

Thanks to Tim for the pointer to this article by Alex Ross in the New Yorker about being a classical music fan who comes to pop music late. (Actually, my experiences are a bit similar; I certainly didn’t grow up in an entirely pop-free landscape, but I did grow up thinking of classical music as “proper” music.) As a teenaged aspiring composer, Ross says he had “an ambitious program of future compositions: thirty piano sonatas, twelve violin sonatas, various symphonies, concertos, fantasias, and funeral marches, most of them in the key of D minor”—that last bit (rather tragically) made me laugh out loud! (I seem to remember my key was C minor; it was good enough for the Sonata Pathétique after all.)

“Thus it was that the spirit of the times, following its habitual course which advances by digression, inclining first in one direction, then in the other, had brought back into the limelight a number of works to which the need for justice or for renewal, or the taste of Debussy, or a whim of his, or some remark that he had perhaps never made, had added the works of Chopin. Commended by the most trusted judges, profiting by the admiration that was aroused by Pelléas, they had acquired a fresh lustre, and even those who had not heard them again were so anxious to admire them that they did so in spite of themselves, albeit preserving the illusion of free will.…However, this rehabilitation of the Nocturnes had not yet been annouced by the critics. The news of it had been transmitted only by word of mouth among the ‘young.’ Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin remained unaware of it. I gave myself the pleasure of informing her, but by addressing my remark to her mother-in-law, as when, at billiards, in order to hit a ball one plays off the cushion, that Chopin, so far from being out of date, was Debussy’s favourite composer. ‘Really, how amusing,’ said the daughter-in-law with a knowing smile as though it had been merely a deliberate paradox on the part of the composer of Pelléas. Nevertheless it was now quite certain that in future she would always listen to Chopin with respect and even pleasure.”

Thanks a lot, Google. Rub it in, why don’t you?

Blissblog

(L-R) The Pillbox, K-Punk, It’s All In Your Mind, Worlds of Possibility

(L-R) Somedisco, Heronbone, Woebot

(With apologies to Matt for shameless idea stealage, and to everyone who’s not listed, and possibly to everyone who is.)

Finally got my copy of the celebrated Michael Mayer Fabric CD. I’ve been subscribing to the Fabric CD series for about a year (I won’t be for much longer though; the strike rate has been rather poor lately), but this CD—the one I was most looking forward to!—got lost in the post. Big ups to Fabric though, they sent me another copy as soon as I asked for it. Anyway, as if to reward me for my long wait, the CD is utterly brilliant, but those of you who are interested know that already. My favourites are of course the Westbam and Nena track (diva house lives!) and that heartstring-tugging Superpitcher track. And of course Villalobos’s “Easy Lee”; has anyone actually figured out the lyrics to that one? The only thing I feel slightly equivocal about is the bookending of the CD with those two mixes of Heiko Voss’s “I Think About You”, which everyone else seems to love. It’s not that I don’t like the track, but I can’t help wanting something a bit more oomphy and portentous as an opener, and something a bit more spacey and numinous as a closer. Is it just me? Anyway, that’s a minor quibble; overall, this is at once the best single-disc overview of microhouse you can get, and a loving tribute to dance music’s past.

As well as being a great DJ, Mayer is something of a cultural hero. I’ve been in love with him ever since he listed Kylie and Justin Timberlake right up the top of his end-of-year chart for Boomkat.com in 2002. (This is even more endearing in the context of the sensibilities generally on offer at Boomkat.com; I notice he wasn’t invited back last year!) No less than two (but in fact probably more than two) regular readers of this blog have interviewed Mayer recently; apparently he’s a lot of fun in person as well.

***

As if one new microhouse mix wasn’t enough, I’m now listening to the new Barking Spider mix by another cultural hero, Philip Sherburne. Philip calls it a “rough draft”, but surely that’s exactly what you want in a DJ mix! Anyway it doesn’t sound too rough to me, just lots of the kind of brainy-but-funky, glitchy, rhythmically complex microhouse that you’d expect. (If you’ve been wanting to hear that Superpitcher remix of Contriva’s “Stuck” that Philip’s always raving about, that’s on here, starting at about 29′30″; I only recognise it because I downloaded it on Philip’s recommendation! And it’s the first time I’ve ever heard an Australian accent in a microhouse mix too; I won’t give away whose, see the first comment.)

Another highly recommended recent online mix is “Eucalyptus” by Sami Kovikko, which together with Philip’s mix would make a pretty good, and completely free, introduction to microhouse if you have the urge…

Unlike the crowd at NYLPM, I don’t seem to be getting very many Janet Jackson breast-related referrals. I am, however, getting 2-3 visitors a day who arrive here searching for the phrase “sic transit gloria mundi”, which I (very pretentiously) used as a post title recently. Some of us just attract a better class of Googler, I suppose.

James Russell anoints as the “most foolish thing said in the blogosphere of late” a comment from cnwb on this very blog: “Thank god mainstream Australian music has people like Mandi Kane.” Like the gentleman he is, Chris takes this in good part. My question is, if we don’t need more cross-dressing goths in this country, what do we need more of? What does our little antipodean corner of the blogosphere envisage when we dream of our ideal Australian pop artist? Or don’t we have dreams?

By the way, Chris’s post reminds me to thank whoever it was that nominated me for the Australian Blog Awards (as “Best Personal Blog”). I didn’t win of course, and I didn’t even find out I’d been nominated until it was all over, but I’m very touched.

Hmmm…

On the one hand, what an absolutely bloody hideous idea. 25 years! Ha!

On the other hand, Go Chic! Go Donna! Go Kraftwerk! Go Giorgio! Go I Feel Love!!!